Maps, Maps, Maps

If you were reading this blog last year in May, you might remember the map cabinet.

Anyway, May is when the glorious map cabinet came to live here and house the many and varied maps and paintings and oversized whatnots that are flat.

It has done an admirable job, and I still love it now as much as I did when it first came home. I probably love it more, in fact, because it makes things so much easier to find.

But it also provides temptation. It has space (a bit at least), and now when I find maps, I know there is room for them. I've been resisting recently. Or I had been resisting until tonight.

Tonight I was pointed in the direction of a site called Historic Map Works which completely undermined my resolution.

Yes, they are reprints. But they are glorious reprints. And, let's face it, I can't possibly afford the originals of a lot of maps I want to peruse.

Even better, right now you can access all their maps for free online! They are a subscription site, apparently, but until the end of August, it seems, anyone who wants to can look at all the available maps.

So I did.

In fact I spent the whole evening looking at maps. Seb and Neely were not best pleased.

But I've been trying to track down a map of landowners of Fayette and Lavaca counties in Texas for ages now. And while these aren't as early as I would like, they're a great place to start. And so I gave in to temptation and not only looked at them online, I ordered copies. At $4.99 apiece, they seem well worth it.

I also found wonderful bird's eye views of some of the places we've lived a hundred or more years before we lived there. And I found a great railroad map of Texas from 1871. And I found a map of the place we live now when it was still a field. Pretty neat stuff.

The map cabinet is happy. I'm happy. And if you like maps, you will probably be happy to check out Historic Map Works, too.

And Kate H, if you should check it out, it does mostly have US maps, but there are some English maps. Not enough. But maybe they'll get more. Hope so.